


Fever Dream

by scavengethestars



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Castle Black, F/M, Game of Thrones AU, Jonerys Secret Santa 2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-30
Updated: 2019-12-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:22:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22027027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scavengethestars/pseuds/scavengethestars
Summary: Jon and Dany share a vision, of sorts, and she finds herself at Castle Black in a panic.  Jon is a little bewildered, too.
Relationships: Jon Snow/Daenerys Targaryen
Comments: 6
Kudos: 54





	Fever Dream

**Author's Note:**

> A gift for my Jonerys Secret Santa giftee, daeneryskhaleesi! I hope it brought you a little bit of joy!

There was nothing at all.

A sheet of black – a suffocating sheet pulled tight over his chest, then up over his mouth, and finally over his eyes, heavy blood turning black at last, too, and then disappearing. There was no sound, no faint flicker of light, no movement, no touch and no taste. There was nothing but black. But there was something, wasn’t there? There was a depth to the black. He almost failed to see it, it took so long for him to realize it was there. Black, a deep black, and his body, hollow, freshly killed, floating through it. There was no pain, at least; not anymore. That’s why he believed maybe there was no blood. Everything was, finally, empty and ready to be abandoned. There were no gods waiting to carry him home. Only this dense, unfeeling black, and was there peace in that? Maybe for a moment. Then there was nothing at all.

But there _was_ \- why wouldn’t it leave him alone? It was frustrating; he was _dead_ , but he was frustrated. His blood wasn’t gone, after all: it was pounding through him, heavy in annoyance now, and there was a glint of light. A sheen across the black, motion and light, like the sun dancing over water to make it shine. No, not water. Scales – he knew it the way he knew he knew he wasn’t really dead. Scales. The black was the black of scales. Huge, unreal, beautiful scales; they weren’t from this world. They weren’t dusted with snow, and in fact, the light sliding across them almost felt warm. Could he feel it? The same light that shimmered across that strange, cobbled hide was warm on his skin. It was warm the way his blood was warm, beneath his skin, and the thumping in his chest was his meaty, living heart. Hadn’t a knife just been plunged through it? Many knives, all across his torso, but his heart wasn’t stumbling slowly to a stop the way it had only moments ago. It wasn’t flagging under the exhaustion of knowing it would never start again. Was there peace in that, too? He was ashamed to know the answer. What was left, after all? _Who_ was left? Betrayed by the only brothers who likely remained to him, life given and taken for nothing, in a place he never should’ve been. Where should he have been? Should he have _been_ at all? A bastard lost in the snow.

He wasn’t _breathing_ , not yet, though he also wasn’t dead: his mind was reeling. Now it was pushing through the black, and it was most certainly a living black. It was _heavy_ , he could feel it even if he didn’t understand it: it was heavy like a body, an animated, moving body, full of pulsing blood and muscle. And it was also strangely light, as if it was not lumbering across land, but gliding through high, thin air. It was, he realized, the motion of flight. The light catching on the black, turning it to shards of dark glass, was the sun, breaking across a body in flight. He could feel it: the whip of cool air across his cheeks, tangling through his dark hair, all of it invigorating his searing blood. It _was_ searing; it was burning. Everything was suddenly burning. It was aching, the way a heart aches at the sound of a voice from home. It felt as if something was speaking to him, or to his blood. Someone was pleading with his blood, as if it was no longer only his own, but part of another body, as well. It wasn’t just his own body burning against the frozen hand of death. He wasn’t dead. He could see, perhaps through eyes that weren’t his own: oceans, one of water and one of snow, rushes of color, that flaming black, slashes of silver. Blood, he would always know that color first, and the roaring silence of the blue sky. There _was_ a roaring, a deep, guttural, bone-rattling roar; none of these things did he know, and he assigned them all to the delirium and shock of death. His dying mind had placed him in the heart of a dragon. He could feel that wild heart tearing through his own chest, its raging blood cutting through his bones, its desperate, furious cry breaking through his own ribs. How strange that his fragmenting brain should choose _this_ as its final image, its last hopeless vision flung before the void. The dragons were all gone.

It didn’t end with the dragon, though. His defiant heart hammered for something else, tirelessly, silver flickering across his vision now. White-silver, gold-silver, as luminous as the black had been, and colors deeper still: jade, violet, steel. Ice, ivy, stone. All of it made of light, all of it swallowed up in the dark. All of it breaking through, all of it holding back. Maybe she felt trapped, too. He couldn’t ask and he didn’t know, and the pain that flooded his own blood was sweet; he just knew. Of course there was a _she_. Trapped inside the body of a dragon, the same way he felt? It made no sense – where had this snow-silver glimmer come from? How could he feel another’s blood racing? How could he taste her fear as if it were his own? Why was his chest full of that trusting pounding, heart snared by what it had heard? What _had_ it heard? Some feral, frantic song against death, sung too late. He was already gone, and his mind was grasping at lonesome stories. He would be alone soon enough, his tired, empty heart at last finding rest. He only wished he’d had a clearer vision of the glints of silver trying to cut through the closing black. Clashing swords? The moon? Untied hair?

And then he was breathing: suddenly, raggedly, greedily, yanking in as full a breath as his lungs could muster. Then another one on top of that, and another, chest joyously heaving over the work of filling itself once more. Clean, cold air, long, dragging sweeps of it, exploding through his blood. His eyes were open, blind for a moment as he gasped awake, a flicker of horror before anything else. Then halting, dumbfounded understanding, knowing exactly where he had been, and where he still must be. He had not recovered from the vivid hallucination, however; his wide eyes caught a gleam of silver at his side, stark against the dark of the room. It was cold, his skin was already prickling with it, but as his gaze landed on the stranger who was already learning toward him, relief hit him so fully that he closed his eyes against the ache, jarred, skull and spine. He opened his eyes a heartbeat later, a gaze the color of a cresting wave meeting his own. Their eyes held, and he did not understand, but his heart knew. He could never know what crossed his own face, what stunned recognition of home, but the expression he saw upon the silver-haired girl’s told him they were there together. Lost, without a doubt, but for one silent moment found, and the dull pain in his abdomen couldn’t have stopped him from sitting up and reaching forward, a trembling hand coming to rest at the girl’s flushed cheek.

She was already meeting him, fingers quivering across the dark line of his jaw, warmth bursting between them like a lantern shattering the night. Her voice began to leave her, then gave itself up as a breath between them, and he was heavily catching his own, bringing her to him with a hand that slid back into silver hair. The exact silver that had been ferrying him toward death, blade-silver, moon-silver, snow-silver, lifting him back to life now with each impossible breath. Cheek on cheek, starved for a warmth he’d never known, he could feel her hands in wonder at his hair, against his arm, holding on wherever she could, hearing her breath catching on tears. 

“I had to find you,” came the quavering explanation, as if there needed to be one, hardly a whisper. He dropped a hand down her back, awe-struck, bringing her closer, needing everything he hadn’t known he was living without.

“I was dead,” he rumbled, voice pulling itself up out of sooty ashes, remembering how to speak. His heart was pounding, alive as it had never been, and he could feel the pulse of the smaller body as his hand found the side of her neck, stroking, knowing a warmth without words.

“But I saw you.” He had seen a deep, gaping black, too, and then he had ridden out into silver light. It fell around him now, new, unseen by his weary eyes, unimagined, and it was everything he had been waiting for. How could he let it go?

The strange consolation was that she couldn’t let _him_ go, not for a long moment; the net of inexplicable warmth and affection had caught her just as fully. As if she had, truly, found what she was looking for, and hadn’t expected to find him living. Her heart was loud and fierce, and he could feel a chill shivering through her. When she did pull back, eyes bright with the sheen of tears, he knew his own face was reflecting the same expression: raw shock, fear and hope. She sat back and so did he, her cheeks roses and his chest a fist around a fluttering bird. Blood was drumming through him once more, he could feel every inch of his body, and his astonished breaths were coming easier. His gaze didn’t waver from the violet-ice eyes before him, and she looked perfectly bewildered now, trying to read him as if he were a scroll written in a foreign tongue. Tears burned in his own eyes, and the silver girl brushed her thumbs over the tops of his cheeks. He could still feel her trembling. He wasn’t sure how she had come to be holding his face again.

“They tried to stop me from coming in here,” she was confessing, her voice snow-soft, though he could feel the fire beneath it. He could feel everything again. “I’m holding Castle Black right now.”

He didn’t have to ask how; the dragon’s heart was beating as his own. She was holding the castle under the threat of flames, to come find him, and she was holding his face as softly as her own breath.


End file.
